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Friday, October 26, 2007

Goodbye Old Rifle, You Won't Find Another Fool Like Me Babe

My Pervy Muji Rubber-Covered Page Layout Book and page layout grids

It's funny what you can find yourself getting sentimental about; today I finally filled the Pervy Muji Rubber-Covered Page Layout Book that I started back in January 2003. That was a momentous time for me; Scarlet Traces had been serialised in The Megazine and was about to be reprinted by Dark Horse, I was working on XTNCT and just about to start Leviathan, I'd just bought my Titanium Powerbook and was wrestling with OSX, and preparations were well in hand for a six-month stay in Vienna, which would be the first time I'd lived with a girlfriend.

Everything felt like it was about to change forever, probably because it was, and mostly for the better, though this notebook records only the professional side. All of Leviathan is in here, along with the new and rearranged pages for the hardback of Scarlet Traces, plus War Of The Worlds and The Great Game. Every Stickleback page, every page of Judge Dredd; Fables and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, all of it sketched out in shorthand hieroglyphics that anyone else would be pushed to understand (or sometimes, myself; on taking up the layouts for the project Pale Witness after a gap of three years, I had to re-read the script before I could understand them.) 462 pages in all - add nine covers and you have practically my whole output for four years, not that much by the standards of an artist working on a monthly US book, but then I'm producing finished pages from scratch, many in colour, many also lettered.

I don't keep a diary, so books like this are as close as I get, and it's funny how many memories are embedded in old pages; often I can dredge up my feelings from a particular time, all sorts of odd fragments, sometimes even what radio programme I was listening to when I was working on a certain drawing.It seems a good time to finish this book and start another; the now-battered old PowerBook was retired this summer, and although my life has settled into new patterns, Stickleback: England's Glory (part 7 of which is the last entry in the book) is a new landmark - my first continuing series for 2000AD. And though one book closes, another opens; Muji still make refills in that size, so the Pervy Rubber Cover has plenty of life in it yet...

Skipping the lettering makes the job a bit quicker, but then you have to draw more stuff because the balloons aren't there.

Colouring is the one that gets to me if I'm pushed for time. I've done a lot of colouring for other people, and I get phases where I'm burnt out and can't do it any more. I don't seem to have so much of a problem colouring my own stuff, I just wish I could take more time over it sometimes; good colouring takes a long time.

The one thing I do know is, however much I hate a job, it never quite feels right if someone else does it - no matter how good a job they do. I've been lucky to be able to do so much stuff on my own.

Woah! I guess it has been that long now! EEK! We are doing fine! 2 little girly 'uns now (although one is 5 and the other 3!) We moved out of WoS about 3 years ago - too many stairs to get babas up!!! Still in Aberdeen though! Give us a shout next time you're up!